Techie stuff

Cool stuff: Using photos to enhance video quality

Vikkel.com — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:18:18 GMT

Recently I stumbled over a link to this site: Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene. These guys have developed a very cool technique where they blend high-resolution images into digital video to enhance picture quality.

Check out the demo video of the process, it is very impressive what they have accomplished.
I for one am certainly hoping their tool will be available at some point. It would sure help improve some of my own video captures. Not just by enhancing quality, but also making hand-held clips stable in motion (about 4 minutes into the video).
As they say, there are already tools on the market that help stabilize video, but their technique seems to be the winner.

Upgraded to the latest SubText

Martin Vikkelsø — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:46:09 GMT

I recently discovered that the Open Source project behind the blogging tool dropped a new version. Just thought i'd let it phone home and say that it all looks good from here.

Only one thing that seemed odd to me. Regardless of this kind of application being quite easy to upgrade, I found no information about this process on the SourceForge project page. I had to snoop around a bit before i noticed this blog comment on the suggested "how-to". For the 1st time upgrader, that information is key - and I would prefer this to be nailed on the SourceForge projects download page for future releases.

Updating might seem like a clickety-click task for the developers - but for us subtext novices, this sort of information is quite handy. Just so we are sure we do not miss an important step. :-)

Everything can be improved, especially the search in SharePoint

Martin Vikkelsø — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 16:34:18 GMT

My colleague Lars Fastrup and his team have revealed quite a few truths about the search engine in MOSS 2007 (aka "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007"). Lars have been kind enough to share this information on his new blog in the post entitled "The good news and the bad news on MOSS 2007 search".

In case you think his blog looks similar to mine, its no coincidence. I setup his blog as part of one of my tasks in the Mondosoft marketing dept, and simply choose a tool I was familiar with.

While i'm at it, let me just say that "SubText" is a really neat .Net blogging tool. I highly recommend it :-)

So anyways. Lars Fastrup will most likely share alot of interesting details about the soon-to-be-released MOSS 2007. And more importantly, about the features in the upcoming version of Ontolica - the tool which makes searching in SharePoint so much better.
Its true, Ontolica improves the search in SharePoint significantly. Look it up if you dont believe me...

Importancy of the '301' status code

Martin Vikkelsø — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:34:41 GMT

The glorious 301 (three-oh-one) status code can save you alot of trouble when upgrading a website. Especially if you care about google ranks, and assisting your visitors...

During the upgrade to vikkel.dk / vikkel.com I had to do a little 301 implementing myself. See, the old blog-system was built in old-fashioned asp (vbscript), and this new glorious blogging tool is written in asp.net (c#).

The problem at hand:

Old (filename.asp) URL's are becoming obsolete.
New (newfilename.aspx) URL's are entering the stage - but nobody knows about it (especially not the global search engines!).

In order to cure these 2 issues, i had to do the following:
Strip the old scripts for all code, and enter new, valid, 301 redirection code.

Mainly the "entry.asp" file, which displayed all the posts (using old-fashioned querystring values) had to be updated.

Heres the content of that entry.asp file now:

As you can see it actually captures any of the incoming article links, and diverts them to their new URL. Piece of cake!
If i had not done this then right now all links coming from google (or other search engines, including bookmarks), would be pointing at something obsolete. And maybe even worse - at a non existing file due to deletion.

Regardless of what server/solution change you do - ALWAYS make sure you use a 301 redirect from old files to new ones. Otherwise you might as well put a "Sorry, we're closed" sign at your frontpage. Not sure how to do it in your IIS environment..? Let me know, and I will write some more guides.

I've also been doing this at work when we changed CMS to "Sitecore". Even though it meant cleaning 300+ files and making them point at the new version. Boring, but worthwhile and crucial.